The swiping culture lures us with infinite possibilities, but it also exerts a subtle tyranny. The constant awareness of ready alternatives invites unfavorable comparisons, weakens commitment, and prevents us from enjoying the present moment.
Marriage is imperfect. We start with a desire for oneness, and then we discover our differences. Our fears are aroused by the prospect of all the things we’re never going to have. We.
Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance. Excessive monitoring can set the stage for what Stephen Mitchell calls “acts of exuberant defiance.
Neutralizing each other’s complexity affords us a kind of manageable otherness.
He invites us to recognize that our values evolve as we mature and “move from an understanding of ethical and moral issues in black and white absolutist terms to comprehending the gray ambiguity of most matters.”6.
In uncertainty lies the seed of wanting.
Is jealousy an expression of love or a sign of insecurity?
I got rid of my motorcycle when Jimmy was born. I’m not allowed to die in a bike crash anymore.
If you trade passion for stability, you basically trade one fiction for another. Both are products of our imagination.
Adultery is often the revenge of the deserted possibilities.
Today I am a woman torn between the terror that everything might change and the equal terror that everything might carry on exactly the same for the rest of my days. – Paulo Coelho, Adultery.
Freud described eros as the life instinct, doing battle with thanatos, the death instinct.
Given the transient nature of life, given its ceaseless flux, there is more than a hint of arrogance in the assumption that we can make our relationships permanent, and that security can actually be fixed.
I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce. – J. Edgar Hoover.
Almost everywhere people marry, monogamy is the official norm and infidelity the clandestine one.
Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety and fascination.
Erotic intelligence is about creating distance, then bringing that space to life.
Ours is a culture that reveres the ethos of absolute frankness and elevates truth-telling to moral perfection. Other cultures believe that when everything is out in the open and ambiguity is done away with, it may not increase intimacy, but compromise it.
Infidelity hurts. But when we grant it a special status in the hierarchy of marital misdemeanors, we risk allowing it to overshadow the egregious behaviors that may have preceded it or even led to it.
By telling them not to touch I was mapping a space that would give her room to go after him. That, in turn, would give him the feeling of being desired.